


The Book of Two

by IolairesMinion



Category: Naruto, ゼロの使い魔 | Zero no Tsukaima | The Familiar of Zero
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-27
Updated: 2020-11-20
Packaged: 2021-03-07 00:08:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,822
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26147695
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IolairesMinion/pseuds/IolairesMinion
Summary: A book that wrote back… it was weird, but it was a friend. One that they desperately needed.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 14





	1. Naruto 1

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [The Two of Us](https://archiveofourown.org/works/3452600) by [mickeycmick](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mickeycmick/pseuds/mickeycmick). 



Books are amazing things. They can hold within them memories, facts, discoveries, and dreams. Within them can be found the hopes of the writer, or the hopes of the reader. They can tell the stories of worlds that never existed. They can bring the words of the dead into a place where they can be discovered again. Their messages could be spread all across a planet while the creator doesn’t even have to leave their house.

That’s probably why I’d always liked writing. From the time I figured out how to write. It was almost cathartic to me. 

You see, books have something else that I love about them. They only forget when they are forced to forget. Even then, there is always evidence that a page was removed or a mark was erased and that… that was something I always shared with books.

I suppose not everyone knows what that feels like. I knew I was different. I’d heard people’s complaints about not being able to remember what happened while walking through my neighborhood in the morning. I’d heard couples complaining about forgotten anniversaries and other such things. I’d even heard the old man complain about his memory not being as sharp as it once was.

I can remember every single time I even heard a whisper. I can remember everything.

I can’t forget.

Anything.

The first thing I remember is a bright light. My mother’s smile. Then the look of horror on her face. Three dead bodies in the room. The smell of Iron. The feeling of their chakra leaving their bodies. My mother’s chakra, almost boiling with the rage inside of her. My father’s, almost calm with an icy stillness that exploded into motion a second later. 

Then there was that man. That white and black mask. That chakra that was… twisted -inhuman in a manner that I hadn’t seen since- but also had a very human sense of glee to it.

That night - October 10th, 64- is a thing I sometimes want to forget.

But then, I’m afraid I’d forget their faces.

I guessed that’s why I started remembering everything. After all, the oldest memories are the first to go… at least, that’s what I thought at the time

… I still didn’t see why I had to remember everything else. And I do mean everything. For example, by my fifth birthday, I’d eaten 536 soft boiled eggs, as well as 8 eggs that I had left in too long and the yolk got a bit solid... Why do I need to know that!

Personal grousing about what was, in hindsight, a giant boon for me aside, I really liked writing. From an abnormally young age.

The problem was, at that time. It was extremely hard for me to find anything to write on. People didn’t exactly care to have me in their shops, a product of that crappy night. As a result, it wasn’t as simple as going to the local store and picking up a few notebooks. I had to scavenge for anything I could get, mostly out of the trash. Old receipts were usually what I’d managed to use. The backs were usually blank and the paper was sturdy enough to be written on, unlike napkins that tore the second I touched the pencil lead to them. And the best part was that people threw receipts away constantly.

Which is why, on the evening of the 6th of May 70, I was looking through the trash cans between the Yamanaka flower shop and the Harunos’ residence. It was there that I found what would be my greatest treasure: a book bound in scarlet leather with black trimmings, about the size of one of those composite notebooks that you could find in a store and -most importantly- full of blank pages. The moment I flipped it open was the most excited I had been in my life up until that point.

I then decided to flip through the book to see just how many pages there were.

I flipped, and I flipped, and I flipped. After five minutes of counting the pages as I flipped them, only to seem to not get any further into the book, I got impatient and decided to just run my finger across the corners of the page. I did that for a solid two minutes straight before realizing something very amazing: This book had a seemingly infinite number of blank pages in it. I barely resisted the urge to start screaming and shouting as I clutched the book to my chest and ran all the way back to my apartment.

I barely spent the time to lock my door before I had all but jumped on the box that had all my writings and pencils in it. To an outsider it probably would have seemed like a pencil had teleported into my hand and the book had teleported onto my little table, that’s how quickly I was moving from the excitement. 

At first, I transcribed everything I had ever written before. All of the old receipts, along with the other occasional scraps of paper I’d found, added together to about five hours of writing and 43 pages of this notebook. When I had it all down… it just made me want to write more. Before I had written poems and stories on those scraps of paper, but since no new ones were coming to my brain at the time, I decided to just write about  _ everything _ .

I started by writing about the little apartment that the old man gave me on my fifth birthday. The old chairs, the worn couch, the coffee table that didn’t sit flat on the floor because I broke one of the leveling feet when I dragged it across the floor four nights prior and I hadn’t fixed it yet, the bed that was one of the most wonderful things in my life… I even wrote about my toilet’s propensity to just flush itself in the middle of the night.

After that, I wrote about the old man who cared so much for me, about how he would always use clones to finish up his work while he would personally come with me for ramen or to help me get groceries, about how he was one of the strongest ninja to ever live, and how he could probably beat whatever animal masked ninja he always has hanging in the corner of his office. I wrote about how he was the one most responsible for every other person in all of Konoha…

And then I wrote about the people of Konoha. I understand- understood that the people really did have every reason to hate me, even though it was clear to anyone with any education on seals that I wasn’t the tailed beast itself. That fact didn’t matter. I still reminded them of everything that happened that night. The beast that destroyed so much of their… everything, was within me. And I also dared to have a face so similar to the man who was their beloved leader.

Their anger was useless and pitiable, almost, but it was also perfectly understandable. I also wrote all of that at the time.

I then switched gears to talk about the damned fox that I still couldn’t reach. I mean, really? Was it mad that it was in me? Did it just not know how to reach out to me? Did I not know how to reach out to him? I mean obviously I didn’t, but did that duty fall on me?

I really wanted to see that old fox. It was just as much of a victim of that night as the rest of us. Unless it was secretly an Uchiha that had learned how to use the Mangekyo Sharingan, but that thought seemed a little absurd even to my 5-year-old brain. That same brain thought that the (100 story tall) Kyuubi could really use a hug.

I’d written like this throughout the night and for the majority of the next day, only stopping for food and bathroom breaks. By about 19:00 on the 7th, I was getting too tired to even pick up my pencil from the page. I was about to go to sleep, but I had one last thing to ponder, “I wonder who this book belonged to.” To my shock, the book seemed to have understood me since it flipped back a single page all by itself. When it did this, though, it was suddenly on the first page inside of the cover. There, it simply said one thing:

“Property of Uzumaki Karin & Mebuki”

I grew a large grin at this. Whoever this book belonged to, they were kin to me. My regrets about seemingly stealing such a wonderful artifact faded, and I decided to write one last thing on that page “& Naruto”.

I went to bed with the book in my arms, with it warmly lulling me with faint vibrations.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, in case you couldn’t tell, the plans I have for this story will diverge quite heavily from the canon of both of these universes. I’ll admit, I will be taking this story in a few outlandish directions, but I hope I might be able to make them work.
> 
> The story will be told through the perspectives of various characters, but each chapter will only have one character’s perspective. This will be shown in the title of each chapter.
> 
> This story was inspired by one I read a few years ago (that seemed to have been abandoned) that I really liked the concept of (though I slightly disagreed with the execution, as I’m sure some will do with my own take on it). This story was written as “Connected Fates” by MickeyMooseCaramel on ff and as “The Two of Us” by mickeycmick on AO3.
> 
> This story will be posted on both platforms, and my posting schedule will probably be… sporadic to say the least. But, I’ll try to not abandon the story.
> 
> As for the lengths of the chapters, all I have to offer is a shrug. They’ll probably get longer, but I can’t guarantee that.


	2. Louise 1

Steel can be surprisingly weak.

To any who actually use it, it isn’t a surprise, but to others… Enough force and a blade will break. If exposed to too much heat from an enemy’s fire spell, a soldier's armor will melt around them. And when a soldier is buried alive, their steel matters little. Those who have been surprised by that haven’t tended to last long.

Don’t get me wrong, steel is capable of amazing things. It’s just that steel isn’t infallible. It does crack, it does bend, and it does get rendered useless. However, in the world of nobles such things only really seemed to matter to the rarest of earth mages. My mother was a wind mage, so I doubt she realised what steel was incapable of when she created her “Rule of Steel”.

And yet, it was a rather perfect analogy for the way she expected us to live our lives. And for the way she lived hers. The steel masks she made us wear did crack, they did fail.

In my whole eight and a half years of life, I had only ever seen the steel of my mother’s mask crack once. I was around four at the time. I had snuck into my mother’s study in order to… do something? Whatever my intentions were, I forgot them immediately. Why?

Because my mother - the Duchess Karin Désirée de la Vallière, the Heavy Wind, former captain of the Manticore Knights, and the one who taught me the “Rule of Steel” - was crying. I was stunned. It was a world-breaking experience to me. I just backed into the corner of the room, sat and watched.

I watched as she grew angry, then grew sad, then angry again. In the end, she took a small book from off her desk and just threw it into the still burning fireplace before all but running out of the room. I just sat there, for a long time. Long enough for the fire to burn out completely. 

After I had finally gotten over my shock, I chanced a look into the fireplace. There, illuminated by the faintly glowing embers and completely unharmed, sat the book. I don’t recall what my thinking at the time was, but I ended up taking the book and bringing it with me to my room, hiding it under my mattress. I never brought it up with anyone- I didn’t even look inside of it. I was too afraid of what it might hold, what could have made the strongest person I knew cry. 

It just sat there, unchecked and unread, under my mattress for years until the springtime after my 8th birthday. That… it was an intense time for me. It was on my 8th birthday that I received my first wand and… attempted my first spell. It did not go as expected. What was supposed to be a simple levitation spell cast onto a manticore’s feather turned into an explosion. As did the next attempt. And every attempt after.

I was devastated, but I refused to give up. My mother lost hope about a month after, my eldest sister after three, but my father still believed something could be done at that point. He had decided to just throw money at the problem. Private tutor after private tutor. The longest one lasted before giving up and leaving was 13 days. The shortest, 2 hours.

That day another tutor gave up after working me into the ground for about 14 hours straight for four days without the slightest hint of improvement in my casting ability. It was infuriating and tiring. It was one of those days that ended in my wanting to just give up. And the most irritating part of the night?

My bed kept vibrating.

At first I thought it was just my imagination. Then I thought it was how tired my muscles were. However, when I got up to ask a servant for a massage, my body stopped vibrating. When I sat down on my bed in exasperation, my butt started shaking.

I then had the thought that it was my eldest sister playing a prank on me. I tore all of the covers off of my bed only to find a bare mattress. One that was still vibrating. Since the prank device seemed to be under the mattress, I slid that off too. And underneath it all was just that book that I had all but forgotten.

But this time, it was different. The scarlet book that I had only ever really glanced at had rings of runes that I had never seen before and those runes were glowing. Brightly. And the book just kept vibrating before it just… stopped. The light coming out of the runes continued, though.

I was terrified. I was always a little scared of that book but that was before it had… activated? It had just stayed normal for four years and now it was doing this when I was at one of my lowest points.

Of course, I was at one of my lowest points. I was just about desperate enough to do anything at the time. If you wanted me to jump off of the tallest bridge in the world, all you had to do was tell me that the secret to unlocking my potential was at the bottom of the valley. I would have been over the edge before anyone even brought up the possibility of simply walking down there.

So, in this mysterious glowing book I did find fear - so much petrifying fear - but I also found hope. Hope can be a very dangerous thing.

I opened the magical glowing journal that I knew nothing about and stared directly into it.

It was, in hindsight, one of the stupidest things I could have done. It could have held a curse that turned the unsuspecting reader into stone. It could have exploded and turned the entire estate into a crater. A demon could have been released from its magical prison. Anything could have happened.

But all that happened was the runes stopped glowing and the book rested open on my vanity and within it revealed…

Symbols?

It looked like there were a few pages of them at least, but I couldn’t really recognize any of them. I suppose a couple of them looked like “T”s but they had this weird swooping motion to them. They had a resemblance to the runes on the outside… I thought to myself that it might have been a continuation of whatever spell had caused the outside of the book to glow… maybe?

But then, what should I do? There weren’t any instructions on how to use magically glowing tomes that I could recall reading and there definitely weren't any instructions that I could read in those pages…

Maybe I should ask the book what to do… that’s stupid, books don’t have ears… but they do have pages. With that realization, I brought the book to my vanity, grabbed my inkwell and pen, and wrote.

“Book, do you have any instructions on how to use you?”

I then waited, and waited, and waited, for what felt like an hour. Nothing changed, and it was clear that it didn’t work. Maybe it just doesn’t like Tristainian. Luckily, I knew a little bit of the other languages of Halkeginia.

However, when I tried Albionese, nothing changed. Same with Romalian, Gallian, and Germanian. It didn’t work… Then I thought of writing in runes. They were, after all, based on the language of Brimir himself. When I was done, I was very proud of myself. It probably didn’t make much grammatical sense, but I remembered the proper rune combinations for the majority of the words.

It still didn’t work.

But it made me think. The runes of the magic that I knew came from an actual language. Doesn’t that mean that these other runes might also come from a language. Then did the writings inside the book actually have to do with a spell, or was it just someone writing in the language those runes came from?

But then, what language did they come from?

With that thought, the book just flipped a page back on its own.

I immediately fell out of my chair and scrambled behind my bed. While I had managed to relax during my experiments with it, I was still terrified of what that book actually was. I hid behind my bed for several minutes, wondering what to do. I would occasionally peak over the top of the bed at that book and it just sat there.

After a while, I cautiously approached the book. What I saw was a completely different page from what I had thought to be the page before the one I was writing on. There, in a handwriting that was somewhat familiar to me, was what looked like a dictionary. One that translated Tristainian into whatever language that the runes were from. It had the name for the language at the top of the page… I think… but it was a Tristainian-to-runes dictionary. I looked through the pages in order to try the inverse, but it was all the same until I just reached blank pages. It was exasperating. 

Finally I decided to ask, out loud, “Can you not show me how to translate the runes?

When I asked that, it just slammed itself shut.

That was rather rude… 

I decided that I was too tired to try and figure out the mysteries of this little book. I put it in the middle drawer of my vanity before I went and remade the bed. My woes temporarily forgotten, I had a new goal for the next day: to figure out that book.

I slept soundly for the first time in months that night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, here is chapter two.
> 
> Louise doesn’t have hyperthymesia like Naruto does, and I tried to make that evident in my writings but just in case I failed at that, now you know?
> 
> Anyway, until next time! Stay safe!


	3. Naruto 2

I woke up on the morning of May 8th around 0700 hours and practically leapt out of my bed. I probably would have literally leapt out of my bed if I wasn’t half on the floor. Instead, I just rolled out of bed, but in a very excited manner.

I’d had a dream.

I needed to write it down.

It really wasn’t that amazing of a dream. I was Hokage and facing a giant flying sentient bowl of ramen that was threatening to drown the entirety of the village in its delicious soup. Since I was Hokage it was my duty to protect the village until the end, so I did just that. I ate the entirety of the contents of the bowl, the thing screaming in agony the whole time. The villagers cheered me on as I chugged the soup that was left. I’d finished the contents of the bowl and found an empty space in the middle of the village big enough to hold the now-not-flying bowl (a place that never had existed in the reality that I’d been present for) and placed it gently there before all of the other shinobi in the village dug out the ground underneath the bowl before pouring water into it with water jutsus. Then, everyone cheered again before they stripped into their swimsuits and jumped into the water for the village’s biggest ever pool party. At the end of the dream, a really tall, really gorgeous woman with orange hair, bunny ears, and nine long tails leaned down to me, kissed me on the cheek, and said “You did well, Naruto.”

...Look, I was young and I went to sleep hungry, okay?

Anyways, I had energetically rolled out of bed to write all of this down but when I pulled the book from where I’d hugged it to my chests, I’d found that it had changed. The plain red and black cover of my journal had changed a little. Well, a lot in some ways. It wasn’t glowing before, but now it was.

The entirety of it wasn’t glowing, just several seals that I hadn’t ever seen before. Most of the seals looked almost foreign to me but, unmistakably, there was the kanji for “light” in the very middle of the cover glowing a little more brightly than the rest.

“So cool!”

Then, when I opened my treasured book, I was in for an even bigger shock. The book had opened up to exactly where I had left off writing the previous night. I had wanted to start writing immediately but as I looked at the place where my pencil was about to touch the page I noticed some new writings.

Writings that I didn’t make.

Writings that I COULDN’T UNDERSTAND!

This was something completely new to me. I just stared in shock. I’d heard about there being languages previous to Elemental in the world, but I’d also read that with the invention of writing most of those languages died out. Of those that didn’t, which I had read about existing in the most insular of communities, they had still adopted the written language of Elemental and had simply bent it to work with their own languages. So to find an entirely new written language had literally written itself in my arms… I was amazed.

It was definitely a written language, too. A rather crude one, but there were still all of the patterns of any other language. Certain symbols were repeated in a manner that almost appeared like how a sentence would appear when written entirely in hiragana. There were also random intervals of large gaps between the letters… maybe to denote the separation of words? That… that actually would make sense in a language. It would certainly make it a lot easier to determine the tempo of the work itself as intended by the author.

It’s amazing!

But how am I ever going to be able to translate it?

With that thought, the book flipped back a single page.

On that page, at the very top, was a title in Elemental, “A How-To Guide to Translating Elemental into *********** (Tristainian)”. Those unknown symbols had appeared again in the title but given the strange new word written in parentheses I managed to figure out, quickly, that it was the word “Tristainian” written in its native tongue. What was underneath this title, though, was a treasure trove.

It was an entire textbook about learning the language of Tristanian. Not just the written language, pronunciations, intonations, even how regional dialects differ from each other and from the normal language that would be taught in schools.

I read this textbook in its entirety.

While I ate, while I bathed, while I exercised, while I snuck in and planted a pink paint bomb in Anko Mitarashi’s closet, I always had that book open in one hand and almost always had my eyes scanning through its contents.

For three days I read about a language I had never even heard. 

For three days I practiced speaking, writing, and listening to Tristainian in my home.

In three days I learned the language of the person who would become my best friend.

And on the morning of the fourth day, May 11th, I was ready to write to her.

...Not that I really knew that was what I was doing.

I had waited for the time that I was confident in my abilities to read the language before I had gone back to those words that I didn’t write. 

“Book, do you have any instructions on how to use you?”

That was weird.

Why would a book ask itself about having instructions on how to use it? That makes no sense.

But, no one came in and wrote in the book while I was sleeping. I pretty much know that for a fact. I’d hugged that book tightly throughout the entire night. I had imprints on my arms that I thought might form into bruises from how tightly I’d grabbed that thing. On top of that, there’d been no new writings since then and I’d just been leaving the book on the desk every night since then. Also, there’s the fact that the ANBU in the dog mask had put enough seals around my apartment for me to genuinely think that my apartment might be the most secure room in the entire village.

Yeah, the likelihood of someone else writing in it was pretty much zero.

But then, what did write in it?

I guess it could have been ghosts? The same one that’s flushing my toilet randomly? But why would it do that? And where did the writing implement come from? That text wasn’t written in pencil, which is all I have. It was more like someone had written it with one of those calligraphy pens that I’ve seen the old man use when he needs to be a little fancier with his writing. 

I am way too broke to own one of those.

And then there’s the writing after that too. The same symbols, but in completely different order. Yet, it still seemed to have the same grammatical structure as the initial line in Tristainian. Maybe they’re different languages?

Hmm, let’s try this.

“Do you have a textbook in you about these other languages?”

The book slammed shut. 

I didn’t touch it. The windows were all closed. The air conditioning hadn’t even been turned on yet that year. The book just closed itself. Loudly.

I guess that’s a “no” then.

So then, where the hell did this other language come from? Where did any of it come from? Is there some mischievous spirit inside of this book having fun at my expense? Or is it just randomly jumbling up symbols, and creating new symbols and a new language and writing an entire textbook about it? No, that makes even less sense. No seal should be able to just create a language. I really don’t get it.

Just what is this book?

And with that thought, the book slammed open again.

On the page presented was a single passage in Elemental that looked like it had been transcribed from a conversation:

“It finally worked… I think. The book is finally able to copy itself across its two copies. Both books should always be able to show what is in the other. It’s a perfect way to always stay in touch, no matter how far apart we are. We could probably be able to use this across dimensions if we ever ended up that separated! I LOVE SEALS! Hey Mebuki, you can read all of this, right? Mebuki?”

… Two books… that are connected…

Someone else did write in my book. But they never had to even get close to my room.

This... is amazing!

Someone from a culture I’ve never read about, speaking a language I have only heard from my own lips, is able to write to me in an instantaneous manner. That’s just…

Wow!

There’s so much I want to do so much I want to write. Where do I start. I mean I don’t want to be rude but still.

Could it be that this person is actually from another dimension? That would explain how multiple languages with the same writing could have gone unnoticed for so long. That, or they could be beyond the shroud. People from the rumored other continents, the other side of the world that has only ever been visible to those shinobi who were powerful enough to go to space and come back alive. That would be even more amazing.

I just can’t wait to find out!

...but I probably shouldn’t forget my manners.

I guess I should start this like I would a normal conversation with a complete stranger.

Not that I have much experience with that.

I guess I should start this like how the old man taught me a normal conversation with a complete stranger should start.

With that thought, I took up my pencil and wrote with a language I had just learned:

“Hello, my name is Naruto. What’s your name?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And there’s chapter 3…
> 
> Okay, I’ll be honest. When I said my updates would be sporadic I didn’t think I’d meant it in quite this way. 
> 
> Hey, at least the story isn’t dead?
> 
> Yeah, sorry about that…
> 
> I hope that I’ll be able to update a little more frequently, if that matters much to you dear reader?
> 
> Anyway, until next time, stay safe!


End file.
